In the House of the Hangman 1270

So I totally
understand people who don’t want to go to the AWP for this or that reason, but
the fact is that Raul Zurita gave a couple of readings this year as well as
appeared on a panel on the translation of Latin American poetry, so I’m happy I
went. From Zurita’s Purgatorio: “When faced with horror, we had to respond
with art that was stronger and more vast than the pain and damage inflicted on
us. I believe this is what I thought in 1975, a year and a half after the
military coup. It was then that a few soldiers subjected me to one of those
typical abuses in which they are experts. I recalled the well-known evangelical
phrase: If someone strikes your right cheek, turn the other to him. So I burned
my left cheek. Completely alone, I enclosed myself in a bathroom and burned it
with a red-hot branding iron. Purgatory began with that laceration.” To
recognize this is to recognize that Spivak has carried out a double
displacement: not only has she replaced the question of whether the subaltern
does speak at a given moment with the question of whether it is possible for
them to speak at all, she has even more importantly substituted speech for
action, as if, again, there exist opposing worlds of language (in which we are
trapped) and being (which remains inaccessible to us). Had she not carried out
this substitution, her essay would have been far less effective; for the subaltern
or the masses never cease to resist and rebel even as they are constituted by
these actions as the masses. These are fragments of a geophysical “playback”
recording from an oil company’s exploration department. A pattern of sensors
responded to a shock. The signals were taped. A computer “massaged” the tapes.
But need remains for human judgment. The program is not quite capable of typing
out a letter to the finance Committee: “Invest $[ ] at Latitude [ ], Longitude [ ]. You won’t be sorry.” Welcome to Bellona. Phones
and TVs are out; electricity is spotty; money is obsolete. Riots and fires have
cut the population down to a thousand. Gangsters roam the streets hidden inside
menacing holograms of dragons and griffins and giant praying mantises. The paper
arrives every morning bearing arbitrary dates: 1837, 1984, 2022. Buildings
burn, then repair themselves, then burn again. The smoke clears, occasionally,
to reveal celestial impossibilities: two moons, a giant swollen sun. Howl, howl, howl, howl. A coyote raises
its muzzle to the night sky and bays, his body small in a blankness of snow.
Though the sky is black and starless, white radiance pours from above. The bare
branches of trees shimmer against the encircling dark. The thin trees are in
chains, fastened to the frozen ground, guaranteed straight growth. Telephone
lines glimmer in the void of the scene’s edge, along with dim city lights. The
yellow of a fire hydrant glistens in discordant hue. The aerial luminescence
for which the coyote gathers its brown body into a territorial howl is not the
moon but a halogen light, so high above the animal that we glimpse only its
concrete base and straight-as-a-trained-tree metal. Howl, howl, howl, howl. A coyote bays at an artificial light
mistaken for its lunar companion. Nature vs Culture? The image on closer look
will not sustain such division. No footprints in the snow mark the coyote’s
progress toward participation in this strange still life; this animal’s dead
and taxidermied.

Comments

the AWP will be here in D.C. in 2017.
at the D.C. Convention Center and at the
VERY expensive Marriott hotel....

must be profitable... this Poetry Game
for the Committees of Management.

y'all come and visit me when y'all are in town ...
when you have less time

you can reach me via the email address on my web-site...
no use calling I got rid of my rotary phone and refuse to get one of those little electronic ones whose Z-waves cause brain cells to die
... and worse.